What’s your vision for Gerry Loves?We want to promote bands that need and deserve it and we want to produce beautiful, handcrafted products – to provide a tangible document of art, which is something we’re in danger of losing in the digital age. But we’re not technophobes: we love our iPods and the opportunities that the internet gives us – we do most of our promotion and sales on the web – and we offer a free download with all our records at the time of purchase.’

How can a vinyl label thrive in the digital age?‘The web offers some real power to market music to smaller groups of people effectively – we’veseen streaming and free downloads help our sales. And I think there’s a good market for small labels doing short runs with nice packaging. I’m not sure there’s much money in though: our label is an expensive hobby rather than a viable business, and I don’t really see that changing.’

How important is your visual aesthetic?Very important. We fell in love in music as an all-round package. Music is a living, breathing thing, and art and design is a big part of that. The visual identity that Peter Saville created for Factory, or that Vaughan Oliver did with covers at 4AD is arguably as important to those labels as some of themusic they’ve released.’

What’s coming up on Gerry Loves?More gigs, more releases and we want to experiment with different models of selling things. Lots of ideas – keep an eye on our website for details as they emerge!’